


Bad Neighbourhood

by Yidkirkin



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
Genre: Brother Feels, Friendship, Gen, Gotham City - Freeform, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Robin Jason Todd, Swimming, Teenagers, he was a minor character in the btas comics verse, ok if you don't know who danny todd is thats cool, who was jasons older brother who died, you do not need to know what he is like he is basically an oc here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28579329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yidkirkin/pseuds/Yidkirkin
Summary: Gotham might be the most crime ridden city in North America, but it isn't all bad. The streetcars still run, people make a living, and kids will find places to have fun. Jason goes swimming for the first time in his life when a water main breaks out behind the abandoned train tracks in the Bowery, and he has fun.
Relationships: Catherine Todd & Jason Todd, Catherine Todd & Jason Todd & Willis Todd, Gotham City & Jason Todd, Gotham City Residents & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Willis Todd
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	Bad Neighbourhood

**Author's Note:**

> I got a story request, y'all! the prompt was 'Jason, pre-Robin, and swimming'! I had a lot of fun writing this, but like usual I let it get away from me. The character Danny is taken from the Batman Adventures comics -he was introduced as Jason's older brother. I liked the concept but really didn't dig the execution, so thus this little story came to be!

Jason lived in a bad neighbourhood. He knew that because Willis said, “We’ve got a roof, and it ain’t the worst,” whenever he got laid off from working the yard, as he reached into the fridge to get a beer. He knew that because Mom would say, “It isn’t the best, but it’s home,” when stocking shelves at the grocer two blocks over threw her back out and she had to lie down on the couch for hours. They both meant the same thing –no matter how things are, remember that it could change.

Of course, Jason heard Mr Cardoso say that every neighbourhood in Gotham was a bad neighbourhood, that the city was crumbling into the bay along with all the people in it. He didn’t always listen to Mr Cardoso because the old man had a bad leg from the war and complained about everything, but Jason thought he might’ve been more right about Gotham than Willis or his Mom.

No matter where he went with his Mom on her rare days off, Gotham looked the same. His Mom told him about other cities, but he couldn’t imagine it. In Gotham, the pier had been closed for ages and no one visited the aquarium on the bay because once, the glass had cracked on one of the tanks and started spraying water all over the place. The parks were all over-grown and full of trash, and there was at least one pothole on _every_ street –if they took the streetcars Jason sometimes made a game out of checking through the window and he hadn’t lost yet. They had to be careful walking down the sidewalks, since one time Jason saw a lady bump into a tall man in a colourful suit and get slapped, and when Jason asked, his Mom told him that Galante’s men –mobsters –just acted like that all the time.

The only place Jason had ever been to in Gotham that looked less rundown was the business district, where people worked in offices and got coffee from special shops on the corner instead of from the lady who ran the laundromat while you waited for your clothes to dry. But Mom said the buildings were still really old and that no one actually lived there, so that didn’t really count.

Apparently other cities weren’t like Gotham. Jason couldn’t imagine what that meant.

On weekends, Willis kicked Jason out of the apartment so he wasn’t underfoot, and he usually passed the time at the library or at the lot a few blocks away where someone once nailed a milk crate to the wooden fence so they could practice shooting hoops. Mostly the high schoolers hogged it, but as long as Jason had somewhere to sit he didn’t mind. As long as he wasn’t out walking alone, it was fine.

When Jason started going to school, he’d been too little to notice that the older kids all watched the younger ones like hawks. Now that he was in 3rd grade, he figured out why no one ever walked home alone. Miguel, one of the big kids in 6th grade, had an older sister who almost got snatched and the only reason she was still home was because her friends were walking with her and saw the truck that she was pulled into. No matter how much they hated each other, none of the other kids in his building wanted to see someone _taken,_ so they stuck close enough to watch, just in case.

Of course, if Matty from two floors up didn’t stop putting dirt down the back of Jason’s shirt on the way back from school, he was going to punch him and he wouldn’t even feel bad about it.

Jason knew he lived in a bad neighbourhood, but he liked it. When he had to wait for his Mom to pick up her medication from Mr Valli he’d go stand near the girls on the corner and ask them questions if they weren’t busy. He knew they liked him well enough, because he always got his cheek pinched and Honey would slip him cherry hard candy from her purse every so often. A few months back he got a really good grade on his book report and when he brought it home, Willis was in such a good mood that he actually took Jason down to the convenience store and let him pick any soda he wanted from the coolers. He even found a whole ten dollar bill on the ground once and got the other kids on his floor a popsicle, and they all spent an afternoon jumping around the abandoned piles of concrete behind the gas station.

The most fun he’d ever had in Park Row, though, was when he got to go swimming for the first time.

It was hot out, hotter than Jason had ever felt in his life. Willis was in a terrible mood and it only took a misstep for him to start yelling, so even though he didn’t want to Jason scrambled out of the apartment and down to the street, where the sun reflecting off the pavement made him feel like an egg in a frying pan. Mr Cardoso was backed up into the only piece of shade on the whole street, grumbling about the heat and his leg and fanning his face with his newspaper. There weren’t any other kids around, but Jason spotted Ariel exiting her building a block away and so he started walking –when he said hello she laughed at him and handed him a tissue so he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes.

“You’ll get heatstroke out here, squirt,” she said, but didn’t tell him to scram when he started walking with her down the street. “It’s too bad they won’t put in a pool anywhere around here. Then again it’d probably get just as polluted as the bay.”

“I thought the bay got cleaned up,” Jason said, his limbs heavy –a pool sounded really nice, but Ariel was right that the closest one was all the way up on West 9th. Jason was going to go when he got old enough to take the bus by himself without worrying about creeps eying him up. “That Wayne guy said so on the radio.”

“Yeah, that’s what Wayne says, but I dunno if I trust it. That water’s been giving off orange fumes since my Mama was a little kid,” Ariel flipped her hand in a way that meant she was just talking for the sake of talking. She flapped the same thing at cops who stopped her on the street, the times she had to talk long enough for one of the other girls to go and help her out before she got arrested for some stupid reason again. “If the smog goes, _then_ I’ll believe it.”

“And ain’t no way _that’s_ gonna happen.”

A hand clapped down on Jason’s shoulder at the same time as that was said, and when Jason looked up all he saw was red hair and a big cocky grin.

“Danny!”

“Hey, Dan, good to see you back.”

Danny lived in the same building as Jason and was supposed to be in high school, but he dropped out so he could work and take care of his grandfather. He just got out of a three month stint in Juvie for fighting because –and Jason _wasn’t_ supposed to know this –he had joined up with one of the street gangs. Danny and Jason’s Mom worked the same shifts at the grocery store and she had vouched for him to keep his job after he was released, so Danny had offered to watch Jason if she and Willis ever needed it.

They hadn’t yet, but Jason didn’t even care about being _babysat,_ like a baby, because Danny was the _coolest_ person he knew.

“Couldn’t leave my favourite little shit alone for long,” Danny said, and used the hand on Jason’s shoulder to pull him back and dig his other hand, knuckles first, into the top of Jason’s head –Jason squawked but was too small to shrug the older boy off. “Nor the lady who has stolen my heart.”

Ariel snorted and grinned in a way that reminded Jason of someone famous, who people liked to take photographs of for the paper. “You charmer, you. But you’re still too young, hotshot.”

Danny lamented her rejection and Jason wrinkled his nose –he knew it was her job, but sex talk was _gross_ and he rather wouldn’t hear it.

They stopped on the corner and Ariel went left to the pharmacy, and Danny watched her get close enough to the doors to be safe before he swung around and started pulling Jason down the street to the right. He’d quit it with the noogie at some point and instead rested his arm across the back of Jason’s shoulders, and while the heat made it a little unbearable the fact that Danny was so tall cast enough of a shadow that Jason wasn’t about to die.

“Me ‘n the boys found something cool, Jay, wanna come with?” Danny was heading for the lot Jason usually hung around in, and while it wasn’t as loud as normal he could still hear the shouts of other kids from a block away. No wonder there hadn’t been anyone outside his building; the lot got more shade than anywhere else within five blocks except the park on East 8th, but that one always had a few needles lying around so Jason’s Mom asked him not to go there. “I think Jerome and Tess are bringin’ their kid brothers too, so it won’t just be you and a bunch of older guys you don’t know.”

“What’s ‘something cool’?” Jason asked dubiously. He trusted Danny but Willis never liked it if he accepted things too quickly, said it would make him an easy mark.

“Ever been swimming?”

(In a year and change, Jason wouldn’t care about swimming. Willis would be in prison for getting involved with Two Face and Mom would be dead, and Jason would be out in the cold. Danny helped him out a little, then, let him crash in his room for awhile and bought him food when he got a bit of spare cash from his job. He even offered to let Jason keep some of his stuff in his apartment since his grandfather wasn’t going to notice.

Jason refused, but didn’t say anything when a new pack of socks and Danny’s hand-me-down boots ended up in his bag. Nor when Danny’s one good winter coat somehow got pushed into his little cubbyhole in the abandoned bodega on East 15th after it snowed the first time. It didn’t matter in the long run. A couple weeks later Danny jumped into a big gang brawl in one of the old junkyards and got stabbed and died. Jason found out when he walked by his old building and saw Danny’s grandfather putting his things out on the curb, and when the old man went back inside he swiped one of Danny’s pocketknives and tried not to think too hard about him ever again.)

But right now, Jason was overheated and sweaty and the closest he’d ever got to swimming was taking a cold bath when Willis wasn’t around to yell at him for wasting water.

“ _Swimming?_ Who’d you think I am, some kinda rich kid?”

A bark of laughter, and Danny scrubbed a hand through Jason’s hair again. “That’s the spirit. You _gotta_ come, Jay, one of the water mains burst the other day and Barker told me they haven’t clocked that it spilled into the creek behind the Bowery train tracks yet. If you don’t swim now you’ll have to wait a _billion_ years.”

“I wanna come! It sounds cool!” Jason squirmed a little and Danny let him out from under his arm, but he still felt really gross because of the sun beating down on them. “Wait, isn’t that where Mac’s camp is?”

“Nah, pigs made them move a couple weeks back. Bunch’a pricks,” Danny scowled at the thought, but his mood lifted quickly when they reached the lot and a group of teenagers around his age waved him over. “C’mon short stack, there’s the gang.”

Jason felt shy all of a sudden, faced by such a big group of people all more than five years older than he was, but luckily there were a few other kids near his age who had tagged along. Virgil, who was twelve and went to the school on the other end of the neighbourhood; Hyon-gan, who was ten and Jason had seen punch an older kid so hard the guy would have gotten nose surgery if he could’ve afforded it; and Eamonn and Sean, twins who were nine like he was and had only moved to Gotham a few weeks ago. Danny got swept up into his group of friends so Jason trailed along behind with the other kids and they eventually started talking about whether or not they thought Batman was real, and before he knew it they were scaling the chain fence that surrounded the tracks.

The creek wasn’t really a creek, just a spot in the woods that sloped down a good ten feet into the ground and accumulate leaves in the fall and mud in the spring. Jason had been here once before on a dare, but it had been bone dry at the time and Mac had quickly spotted him and yelled for him to get lost from the open flap of his tent. Besides people looking to sleep undisturbed, no one came around here anymore, not since this part of the Bowery train yard had been shut down when Jason was _really_ little.

Now, though, the weird well in the ground was flooded with water with no signs of draining out, because on the other end from the busted water main there was a bunch of logs blocking where it should properly flow out. Jason remembered what Ariel had said about the bay, but he didn’t see any fumes coming off the little pool so when Danny started shucking his runners and socks, he followed suit.

“You five stay _here_ , _alright?_ ” A bigger boy with a shaved head told them, pointing to the closest side of the pool, the exact middle between the broken main and the pile of logs. “You ain’t been swimming before, I don’t want you fucking drowning! An’ _you_ don’t want your older siblings to go to jail now _do_ _you_?”

“Relax, Dusty, no way are my brothers that stupid,” an older girl came up and pushed the twins’ heads together, then ran and jumped into the water in her tank top and shorts, leaving Dusty to shake his head and glare a bit more before he wandered off. Jason looked at the water and then made eye contact with Hyon-gan, and although they didn’t speak he assumed they were coming to the same conclusion that it would be better to do as told than, at best, get beat up for being idiots.

Jason had never been swimming before, and neither he nor anyone he knew owned swim trunks, so he leaned over the edge of the pool, made sure he wouldn’t step on trash or something, and plunged in up to his waist all at once. The water gushing out of the main must have been strong enough to blow away most debris on the ground, because all he could feel under the soles of his feet was hard packed dirt rather than soggy leaves or twigs. Beside him, Eamonn and Virgil were laughing and splashing in too, though both of them had left their shirts on and it made them look much smaller than when they all walked over.

“Is it cold?” Sean asked, head swivelling from the pile of shoes and shirts to where someone was being lifted out of the water and thrown a few feet away, making a big splash.

“It’s like tap water! The heat must be making it warm up,” Jason told him. “You should try it, you’ll feel bad if you miss out!” Sean still looked unsure, so Jason clambered back out of the pool at the same time that Hyon-gan decided he was going to bull rush in, and got a wave of water in his face for his trouble. He sat down on the ground with his feet still submerged and elbowed the kid in the side. “Try it, like me.”

After a few seconds a second pair of feet dropped into the water and Sean made a sharp noise of surprise, but once he got used to it he began inching closer and closer to the edge. Jason grinned in triumph and followed along, until a few minutes later they were both in the water and dunking their heads down just to see what it felt like. On such a hot day, it offered more relief than any popsicle or soda could’ve, and finally Jason stopped feeling gross.

The most any of them did in the pool was tread water, because _none_ of them had ever gone swimming before, not just Jason, but Hyon-gan’s brother had told him how to do it before coming over, so he was able to teach them. It was hard work though, and Jason probably swallowed a bit more water than was healthy, but it was the most fun he’d had in ages, even better than climbing the concrete at the gas station. By the time the older kids decided it was time to call it quits the sun was much lower in the sky and Jason’s fingers were all pruney and weird looking, and he was _tired._

This time he wasn’t left to talk with the others; after Danny shook his hair out like a dog he helped Jason wring out his shorts and socks before everyone began putting their shirts and shoes back on and they all climbed back over the fence. Jason, despite himself, quickly started to droop once they were on their way, the heat and being worn out from having fun getting to him fast. He must have fallen behind more than he realized, though, because after a minute of walking Danny was asking him if he was okay, and then when he mumbled an affirmative the older boy snorted and grabbed at his arms.

“Whoa!” Jason exclaimed as he was swung up into a piggyback, and there was a moment where he couldn’t get his balance and thought they might both topple over, but eventually Danny found his footing. Jason wrapped his arms around Danny’s neck and held on, trying not to let anyone see how red his face was going. No one had ever carried him like this before. “I can _walk_.”

“Fat chance,” was shot back at him, and Danny picked up the pace to catch up to his friends –a few made cooing noises at them, but when Jason snuck a peek everyone just looked like they were joking around. He resigned himself to his situation and let himself zone out slightly, half listening to the conversations going on around him as they trekked back into Park Row from the Bowery and people started to split off back home.

Danny said his goodbyes easily once they made it back to their street and hefted Jason again before heading down the final stretch home. In the distance Jason could hear sirens and the sounds of construction equipment, and if he squinted and craned his neck he could just make out the tops of the burned out buildings that Mom and Willis said were set on fire by Daggett Industries. With the sun lower in the sky, the air had started to cool slightly, and Jason shivered a bit as a breeze hit his wet hair and the water dripping down his shins.

“Nearly back, Jay,” Danny reported. Jason hoped Willis was in a better mood, he didn’t want to get yelled at for having wet clothes. At least Mom would probably be home by now, unless the store asked her to stay late again –she never said no when Willis was laid off at the same time. “Have a good time?”

“Uh-huh,” Jason nodded and yawned, and Danny laughed again.

“Good,” he said, and when he kicked open the building doors Jason opened his eyes long enough to spot Mr Cardoso still sitting in the shade, reading the paper and wiping at his forehead with a napkin. Once they entered the apartment stairs the temperature lowered even more, and Jason would be glad to put on dry clothes again. “Kids should get to have fun every now and then. ‘Specially in a city like this.”

Right, because other cities weren’t like Gotham, Jason thought fuzzily. Crumbling into the bay with everyone who lived here inside it. But Jason didn’t mind –he liked his bad neighbourhood, and he liked the city it was in, too. It was home.


End file.
